


Golden Masks and Dancing Glass

by Lavender_Seaglass



Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls Online
Genre: Buoyant Armigers, F/M, Sort Of, clockwork apostles, fun in morrowind, never trust a daedra
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:34:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25011721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavender_Seaglass/pseuds/Lavender_Seaglass
Summary: Knowledge must be found--and to find a thing, it must be hidden.So says her god.Maybe that's why she made the mistake of listening to a daedra. In the end, her curious nature got her. And it couldn't have ended any other way, if she believed her god.





	Golden Masks and Dancing Glass

**Author's Note:**

> aka a Clockwork Apostle follows a daedra to Nirn. This is what happens afterwards, and she (maybe) f finds the place where she belongs.

The world as she entered it met her on its own terms--unrelentingly, and without any kindness. She was not unused to her surroundings being profoundly hostile towards her mortal form, but suddenly everything that she had never known had vanished like an interrupted dream. And been replaced with more things than there ever could possibly be sequence plaques to catalogue. 

It took her many, many moments laying upon unfamiliarly springy and spongy terrain to make an attempt to orientate herself. The sky was grey and the world was wet from the water which sprinkled errantly down from the clouds above. She was staring at the vast emptiness, devoid of anything but weather. A sky which was open, without any brass structures to girdle and protect everything created from the danger threatened all that which loomed unnamed above and beyond mere mortal sight.

The air was so clean, it seemed to have no smell at all. She almost choked on the depth of her breaths.

When she finally found that she could move her ligaments and muscles, and that all of her fragile human bones were still intact, she sat up, and the world and all its innumerable wonders careened into an aqueous blur. The remains of her last meal of nutriment paste evacuated themselves out of her stomach. The blend of beige gruel and stomach acid caked in the ground before her, and she wrenched herself to her hands and knees and continued to cough, in truth finding some degree of relief in the heaving of her body and the trauma of her throes. When she fainted, she did not exactly fight it. There was a part of her which would rather have the darkness and blackness than the overwhelming reality of what she had done. 

.

She woke again, and nothing had changed, nothing beyond a diminishing of the acrid tang lingering in her mouth. It had not been so many clicks, she gathered, though now she was soaked with water and remembering that it was possible for brass to corrode, something which had only ever been a problem in theory. She had no limbs which she might lose, and logical thought led to the conclusion that she would need much more time spent exposed to the elements to experience any corrosion, but the brass filaments perfectly fitted to her torso and arching against her ribs were a protection she did not wish to lose. So, she needed to get dry. 

Hauling herself up on trembling limbs, she took a moment to survey the feral wilderness around her. Black, porous rock. Porous soil beneath her. And, not so very far away, absolutely enormous mushrooms sprouting out of black crags. She had seen ironstalk mushrooms before, had helped cultivate batches of other sorts of lichen, but never had she imagined that fungi could surmount to such heights. It was not an easy thing to consider that this was not something which had been purposefully constructed by careful hands. For a moment she considered how _immense_ the unseen system had to be beneath the ground. The thought of it sent her insides writhing like a mass of seething eels.

Farther away than the cyclocean mushrooms was a great looming dark shape like the curved back of a lumbering beast just felled, lined with thin veins of lurid red and covered by a shrouding plume of smoke and haze. This she understood immediately to be the Red Mountain. This she knew to be one of the centres of the world which she had just escaped to. Though she recognised it, knew what she was looking at, something unfamiliar assaulted her, came to settle in the bit of her stomach with a weight more cumbersome than a boulder. Nausea surged under her skin.

Standing was not yet a tenable option for her, so she crawled along the pale, buoyant soil and made her way towards the piercingly grey-blue water. Out of all the vivid and clashing colours of this new world, this milder and gentler one was welcome, and inviting, and she wished to partake of it. Its cool promise reminded her of her own bodily needs. Thirst and hunger would soon become issues if not addressed.

Only--it was not fit for consumption. She realised this both immediately and too late. Another bout of vomiting, and she emptied her stomach in a caustic, acidic fit of heaving. ‘By the Great Gear--’ she coughed, and spat the last of her sick into her hand, before wiping it into the granular soil. She knew now what the sea was. And that she was sitting on sand.

As she sat there, she realised also that she could not swim. 

This sent a shiver down her mortal spine, and cooled the dampening heat within her mortal core. This strangely saltine water would likely corrode brass if she were to stay submerged in it, she gathered, but at least it was not as dangerous to her as bodies of oil might have been. Probably. She sat on her knees, observing for several minutes how the water felt on her flesh, how the waters lapped gently, without a single variance in their tempo or cadence. Waves, natural waves. A comforting experience, one which helped her recalibrate and synchronise her mind.

She would simply walk through the water she decided, and she did so, wading to the point where the surface licked her chin and the toes of her boots barely scraped the ground, but she made it to the other side. Once on the shore again she returned to her hands and knees and sidled towards the cover of the towering fungus. 

The textures of organic flora novel beneath her fingertips both fascinated and scared her, the earthy smells invaded her, all of these sensations instilling within her even further an understanding how irrevocable her decision was. And that reminded her. Where was that raven, anyway? Had it not led her into the revealed portal after all? Had it all been a bluff?

Through the miasma of scattered, jostled memories she could not recall what had transpired, not exactly. She knew the nature of memory well enough not to dwell on it right now. Her Lector’s face flickered across the empty stage of her mind’s eye,, illuminated by artificial starlight, and then faded. It would return to her, if it ever did, and was not lost to her.

As she pulled herself into the shelter offered by the tumescent cap of a mushroom, she felt that the pendulum would begin to swing again, coming back on an inevitable motion, and now after all this excitement her energy would begin to diminish after spiking. She would become eneverated. This would not be a good state to allow herself to fall into given her current circumstances, so with a snap of her fingers and a conjured mental image of a well-maintained furnace, she cast upon herself a cloak of warmth. Her clothes began steaming. The exposed Sothic filigree glowed, incandescent, but posed no danger to her and her meticulous control. When she had sorted herself suitably, she turned to the mushroom, and lay one hand upon its rotund stalk. 

And hated it, immediately, the way the fibers seemed to crawl and sway under her touch. She detested how strange and _alive_ it felt.

But she did not recoil from it. She merely retracted her hand, and pulled out an instrument she knew would come to have a great deal of utility in this new world--which really was the old world, if she thought about it--provided that it was something basic and universal and quotidien for exodermals after which she was enquiring. In this case, her curiosity had been roused by the thrill of loathing of something which might be mundane for those accustomed to it.

The brass rod of the perception tabulator was about half the length of her extended arm. It then glowed, functioned, and said to her, ‘Signatures indicate that this fungus is native only to Morrowind. It is not what currently poses a threat.’

Before she could contemplate the meaning of this mild warning from her device, something happened. 

A great, ferocious beast lunged at her from behind, covering her with leathery wings and digging into her with malignant claws. She yelped, and that only seemed to increase its bloodlust for her, its prey.

She struggled against the creature, bringing ice to her hand but, as she had learnt in the Radius at the cost of her looks, her combat magic always had been unwieldy. The glittering shards were smashed to a chill dust by their twinned flailing. With her other hand she created a smattering of acid, and the creature shrieked, and took off with her in its merciless grasp. 

Only to drop her a few metres away, but far more than a few metres down. 

She landed on her left leg, and then was not conscious after that. Not for a long time.

**.**

She finally awoke again. She understood, distantly, that it was night, though she could not see the majesty of the stars. The raven, the Countess of Chicanery, was circling above her in great careening wheels. Her purple eyes were like gleaming gem plucked from a dream-horde.

She thought she asked the raven for help, perhaps even beseeched her, before shifting just a single muscle in her leg, and passing out instantly, mercifully, from the pain.


End file.
